Dye Project: Black Walnuts

We are finally ready for our first dye project! We've learned about some of the key historical plant dyes, assembled our equipment for dyeing with plants, and learned the importance of mordants and fixatives for bonding the dye to plant fibers. For our first dye project we'll be using the hulls of black walnuts (Junglans nigra) to dye white cotton dish towels.





I was fortunate to harvest black walnuts from a neighbor's tree in Seattle while visiting our son, daughter-in-law, and Mako the Alaskan husky last summer. The hulls are a beautiful green when they fall from the tree, but they produce lovely shades of brown dye.

Black Walnuts harvested in Seattle

Since we were travelling, I peeled the hulls with a vegetable peeler, froze the peels in small plastic zip-lock bags, and labeled them clearly in case TSA had questions about them. I had no problems transporting the frozen hulls, and popped the bags into the freezer as soon as we got home, until I was ready to use them.

Peel the soft hulls with a vegetable peeler

Since walnut hulls contain tannins, there is no need to treat the fabric with a mordant. Pretreating the fabric with a mordant such as alum could change the shades of brown produced, so it would be interesting to experiment using a mordant. But for my first project I chose to see what happens naturally.

Simmer the hulls in water to extract the dye

I used my trusty Coleman camp stove set up outside on the patio to extract the dye. I used about a gallon of water for the hulls of 25-30 walnuts, but continued to add water to cover as the hulls simmered. After boiling for an hour or so, I poured the mixture through cheese cloth to strain out the hulls and then returned the dye to two pots of water. I wanted to dye six dish towels, three in each pot, so thought the extra room might yield better results with less streaking.

Strain the dye through cheese cloth

I immersed the dish towels in the boiling dye pots, reduced the heat, and let the towels simmer for a couple of hours. I let the towels soak over night in the dye bath to deepen the color. The next day I rinsed the towels thoroughly. This step took lots of water, and is a concern if you live in a place like the San Francisco Bay Area, which can be prone to drought. One possibility for a serious dyer would be to harvest water during the rainy season.

Simmer the towels in the dye bath, then soak overnight

Rinse the towels until the water runs clear

Finally, I ran the towels through the washing machine to make sure they were color fast, and let them air dry again. The towels have retained their color for many months now, so the natural tannins of the walnut hulls make an effective mordant. You can purchase colorless tanninc acid powder to use as a mordant for other dye projects, which is probably worth looking into.

Let the towels air dry

This was a successful first project and a lot of fun. It's quite satisfying to go through all the steps of gathering equipment, harvesting the dye stuff, extracting the dye, and then dyeing the fabric. In this case the resulting shade of brown is very pleasing.

The finished product